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June 29, 2006
The Legislative Process
This morning I found myself at a press conference celebrating the recent enactment of Ghana's Disability Law, a bill similar to the Americans with Disabilities Act. It aims to provide equal access for the disabled to education, employment, transportation and health care.
The bill's passage is apparently a classic example of years of inactivity followed by a legislative sprint. To take an example I learned much more about today, a domestic violence bill working its way through Parliament has been under consideration since 1999. It's not uncommon for bills to get "lost" for years, since they are filed in paper to a single secretary.
(Consider for a moment the ease with which we can to go Thomas or CQ and research a bill's history, see and search its language and view related public laws. In Ghana, finding existing statutes takes crawling through paper or shelling out for a pricey CD-ROM that contains all the country's laws.)
In 2001 the attorney general, who oversees all legislation, as well as the justice ministry, picked up the bill and began to circulate it among the cabinet. The cabinet decided an education campaign was needed, though that was put off after a cabinet reshuffling in 2004. Eventually a "sensitization program" rolled out into the countryside, and the word coming back was that there was support for the bill but not its provision overturning Ghana's spouse-beating law.
Current law says that the marriage contract implies consent to abuse-this type of thing is sometimes referred to as a marital rape law, since that is essentially what it allows. Because of mixed reviews from the education campaign, the marital rape repeal got pulled from the bill. (The bill still contains prohibitions against "grievous harm," psychological and economic violence, and adds legal and health protections for the abused. It also would mandate that one spouse disclose an HIV-positive status to the other.)
Were these mixed reviews documented? If so, does that document exist? No one outside the government has seen it, raising suspicions that the claims are not accurate. In any case, few women, culturally speaking, would think of marital rape as a crime. At a recent workshop put on by the police to educate Parliament, members laughed at the notion of psychological abuse.
So there is a long way to go, which was and is true of the Disability Law too. Each bill comes up for a weeklong public comment period. As you might imagine, unless the public gets tipped off to when a bill is coming up and its contents, it is very difficult to put together meaningful commentary in a short amount of time. Still, there are respected NGOs whose advice makes its way into the final products.
The difficulties remain because of questions about the Disability Law's implementation. The country has 10 years to come into compliance, but it's far from clear the political will, attention and money exist to get there. The only question a member of the press asked at the briefing was about this next step, and we got a vague answer. But some there speculated that now that organizations of disabled groups have used the channels through which they succeeded, they can do so again.
Apparently the reporter's lone question was not uncommon. (Among about 30 people in attendance there were perhaps four reporters.) The press, I was told, rarely engages in much back and forth in a press-conference situation. One reason for this quiescence, I found out later, may be that reporters get paid by the organizations for their coverage. It's not technically legal, but it goes on regularly. I found the briefing unorthodox in a few other ways, too. It opened and closed with a prayer, for example, and the hot atmosphere and laconic delivery of speech after speech belied the jubilation in the words of each of the speakers. On either end, highlife music bracketed the program, and when it was all over the staff served refreshments.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 02:15 PM | Comments (0)
June 28, 2006
'Nothing is Impossible'
Or so they said on the radio and so it seemed for just a brief instant at the beginning of Ghana's match against Brazil, the World Cup favorite. Then, less than 10 minutes in, Brazil scored the first of its three goals. But like any self-respecting soccer country, Ghana had shut down completely for the game and was not planning to reopen.
In the affluent Osu district people crowded into restaurants and bars. The electronics stores filled up with people gazing at the banks of televisions, and then more people pressed against the glass from outside. At a bar called Duncan's, an advertised "big screen TV" turned out to be a TV balanced on a big box so that the whole place could see. Constant argument and discussion-mostly not in English, except for curse words-peppered the first half.
As the second half began I found myself in the middle of a dead main street. But not for long. People congregated around a giant screen set up near a chain of South African fast-food restaurants as local and international news crews catalogued the action and reaction. The fans watched somberly until the final whistle blew. Then the shouting began.
Conversations turned into yelling matches. People with whistles and horns started to blow them, and drivers followed suit. Men and women decked out in full red, yellow and black regalia streamed into groups, and the groups took to the streets. Huge flags flew out of windows and sunroofs, and informal parades sprung up, stopping traffic. These clusters flew from camera to camera dancing and shouting in front of each before moving along. A thick haze of exhaust built up as the cars sat motionless, honking happily. A man in full body paint threw down a cash box on top of hood after hood, demanding a token of appreciation for his efforts from car after car.
Christos, who is here to make a documentary about soccer in the developing world, drew the attention of group after group. Several denounced the referees and the "whites" (Brazil).
But no one was fighting. No one honked out of anger at the fans blocking their way. As the parade continued on into its second hour, its real purpose became clear. Ghana was the only African country to advance to the World Cup round of 16. This was a celebration.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 01:28 PM | Comments (0)
Thank you: Jonathan; IRP; Jesus
In that order. First to Jonathan, a fellow journalist visiting Ghana to work on a book about the country's 50th birthday. A tremendously resourceful photographer and traveler, Jonathan welcomed me to his swanky hotel on the beach (employer-provided), boozed me up and sent me on my way with his spare supplies in my bag.
I met Jonathan because we are both former IRP fellows, an association that has tapped me into a great network of kind, open journalists in his mold. Competition being what it is, I am often amazed to have these accomplished and talented individuals willing to share their time, expertise and sources, and to meet me in developing countries and give me their extra toilet paper.
Getting to and from the hotel safely was another reason to give thanks. My first cab ride in Ghana-to the hotel-was exciting and fun-filled. It involved nearly 20 minutes of driving, of which about eight were in the right direction. After several days in the wealthier parts of Accra, it was a good dose of reality to spend some time bumping down narrow, rocky streets, between rows and rows of open-air stands selling beer, toiletries and phone cards beneath harsh fluorescent lights.
When we pulled over to ask an old lady for directions, though, I sensed something was amiss. With increasing aggressiveness, I questioned aloud whether the driver knew where he was going. His English was not great, but I am pretty sure that he said "We will ask Jesus." And not much later, we arrived, though the final minute of the trip was spent reversing back toward the hotel past which we'd just screamed, down one of Accra's major streets.
My driver on the return trip was less enthusiastic with his horn and a better driver. He also knew where he was going. But his English was also not great, and he was either drunk, toothless or quite possibly both. Thus in his enthusiasm for the upcoming soccer match, he produced sentences such as "Ok happy small" and "better chop money."
The use of the car horn here, by the way, appears to be an act of friendly communication, much like dogs sniffing one another as they pass on their travels. "Hello," a horn says, "I am here." "Hello." "Hello." Occasionally it means "You, walking on the side of the road, would you like a ride?" Or sometimes the more traditional "Please pull over now so I can go faster."
A toot on the way into an intersection is sufficient communication to alert traffic that you are coming. Once you have announced yourself, further yielding is not necessary, and, if you don't hear a response honk from cars that might be affected, it is apparently appropriate to proceed without slowing down or looking around.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 01:25 PM | Comments (0)
History Lesson
Ghana has a pretty long and storied press history, which in turn says something, I think, about the country's development. Its first newspaper showed up in 1822. While the colonial government published that one, native papers, many arguing for nationalist causes, generated much of the next century of press history. 1885 brought in the first "women's column," and the first daily paper showed up in 1931. (That was the first time a women's column was actually written by a woman.)
As they dodged jail, deportation and sedition laws, several of the key figures in Ghanaian independence founded papers that became a crucial part of the fight for freedom. After independence, the large independent Daily Graphic sold out to the state. (It remains Ghana's highest circulation paper today.) The move reflected the government's interest in controlling the press as well as the journalists' pre-existing interest in supporting the new regime. That attitude did not last.
Fast forward to the early 1990s, when loosened press freedom laws allowed newspapers to serve as the voice of the opposition party. The papers were read and passed along. Radio stations took up the idea of reading newspaper stories on the air and then discussing them. Because radio reaches 90 percent of the population here, this practice brought an educated political debate to the masses.
Here's comparison No. 1: In Mozambique, where I traveled last year, newspapers seemed to be produced by elites and for elites, broadly speaking. The general population, particularly anywhere outside of major cities, was not much up on national news. In my uneducated opinion, the fact that Ghana's papers could have an effect on political debate, popular knowledge and public opinion reflects a broader level of education and infrastructure. Meanwhile, Mozambique is a much larger, poorer country whose national language, Portuguese, is much less widespread.
In both places, the government-owned media outlets are still the biggest and best. The only wire service in these countries is state-owned. The constitutions guarantee press freedoms, but a council exists to mediate between government and the institutions it owns. Thus the power of an independent press is to some degree held in the hands of the state.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 01:11 PM | Comments (0)
June 22, 2006
From Dawn to Decadence
How quickly politics appear. In less than a week our group of two dozen cleaved harshly into cliques--to the point that the Accomplished Writers had to take a step back from all of us. I think it began with someone's insistence that we needn't travel in packs when heading into the city. Who wants to have dinner at a place that only accomodates groups of 14?
This caused sufficient offense to engender a vicious rumor campaign that two of the anti-big-group students had slept together--and now were no longer speaking to each other. (This was not only not true but 100 percent unfounded--and I should know, since I was one of the purported subjects.)
Other slanders traveled quickly. For example, someone overheard a conversation about spectating at a speed-dating session and reported, mockingly, that the conversants had participated in speed dating. (And you want me to be less judgmental of 20-year-olds? (Yes yes, I was once there too.))
My worry is that the young and impressionable among us might have fallen under the sway of the people who thrive on this kind of manipulation. So, for example, when I recently e-mailed some very nice people among the group to ask for their recommendations for Venice and got no response, I had to wonder what they'd been hearing about me. And whither the inappropriate and inexplicable nicknames that popped up and fell into use even by respectable parties?
The final evening came around and, unbeknownst to each other, two groups had set up rival farewell dinners. Rather than concede anything for the sake of comity, everyone stuck to their guns: One side wanted the whole group to head to a touristy restaurant; the other, smaller group wanted to split off to a nice restaurant overlooking the city. Both sides appealed to the writers for adjudication, and for their favor.
The writers decided they'd just as soon stay home, thank you, which was fine with me. I'd sat conveniently immobile throughout the whole thing, and proceeded to do the same for the next several hours while some of us, Accomplished Writers included, polished off the drinks and hors d'oeuvres from cocktail hour and discussed Walter Benjamin again.
Later, the in-town group came sniffing around the villa for more dirt. I was tempted to burst into the hallway in the altogether clutching an empty bottle of red wine, but I decided I had better things to do.
Some of these parties have now set up a Facebook group filled with inside jokes that, like the earlier conversations, take pot shots at innocents. I'm still awaiting my invitation to join.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 06:08 PM | Comments (0)
Once at Uffizi, Drive me From Firenze
At the end of our week at the villa, restlessness descended. We sat in a monumental edifice, surrounded by sculpted gardens, gazing at our navels, and not a few people noticed some incongruities. Some of the Accomplished Writers have spent significant time in places where a big fence around an estate signifies more than just wealth in a vacuum. The wall is there to keep things out--unwanted people, races, ideas. The audience for the readings included a count and a baroness, reminding us of some things that rub us the wrong way.
The estate is something of a monument to frivolity. The massive grounds are decorated with hundreds of statues—some of which are old, some of which are just plain hideous. The art collection as a whole is "95 percent tschotchkes," as someone there said. Some of the nicest pieces, including Impressionist sketches, are in the bathroom. Yet it all must be catalogued and protected, and the commitment necessary to do these things invest it with a solipsistic importance. So, I suppose, just as the rich Renaissance banking families or colonial powers of the 19th century built and promoted their collections as signs of--and on the backs of--their empires, we end up with places like Villa La Pietra. What kind of space do you live in if you have the luxury to travel the world and come back with nothing but goofy glass miniatures? It's not just ridiculous; it's archaic, almost barbaric.
Henry Miller wrote that Europe is full of "museums bursting with plundered treasures." The Uffizi is a good example, full of so many such treasures that they quickly become banal. It also served to remind about the provenance of such collections. When we returned from the museum one of the Accomplished Writers whipped out some Walter Benjamin on the economic and political history behind the history of art and read it to anyone who would listen.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 05:50 PM | Comments (0)
June 21, 2006
Up at the Villa
I spent last night (6/18) at the Villa Camerata, set back on a hill at the edge of Florence. It's been about eight years since I've stayed in a bona fide youth hostel. I'm not as annoyed as I thought I'd be.
Here we see tentative and not-so-tentative interminglings, freighted with sexual excitement and cultural curiosity. This is fertile ground. Over dinner I hear an English woman tell European men about the experience of sketching nude models. "I am an abstract expressionist painter. It's like cubism." Another, talking loudly to be understood, of course, says: "I shower with my underwear on," Indeed, in the night I hear noises that, if not sexual, are not human.
Then a million kids descend with rolling suitcases. Two classrooms' worth. They are high school-age, barely. Maybe drinking their first beers and smoking their first cigarettes.
Think of how sad the almost-made connections are: People come through, stay one night, make friends and depart the next morning with them for Pisa, Cinque Terra and beyond. They travel the whole continent with their new companions, learning their background, their sexual histories and sharing in-jokes about those boorish other Americans. But, as it turns out, the perfect life companion showed up the following night at the hostel, stayed one night, and left with someone else.
Update: My sentimentality is pretty much gone now that I've arrived at the next hostel in Venice. No doors or curtains on the shower stalls, no toilet seats. Maybe I am too old for this. Hostels are now quite the fashion show. Not only does everybody have all the latest backpacking gear, but they also have amazingly short skirts and summer sun dresses. What does it mean when jeans fail to rise above the midpoint of the ass-cheek? My favorite may be the guys who spend 15 minutes primping in front of the filthy bathroom mirrors. Axe body spray is a must. And, when the World Cup is not playing, the hostel shows Fox News.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 06:19 PM | Comments (0)
'Sometimes I Think Your Halo is Blocking my View'
Ever wondered why there is an enclosed second story to the Ponto Vecchio, the old bridge running over the Arno in Florence? It contains nothing but a hallway that runs from the Uffizi, now a massive art museum, to the Pitti Palace. Both, back in the day, were owned by the Medici family and the corridor allowed them to walk from home to work without mixing with the rabble. Now the corridor holds almost nothing but the Uffizi's collection of self-portraits. There is almost no variation in composition among these pictures (most are Renaissance-era), but one exception, by Marc Chagall, is below.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)
June 16, 2006
Big Night
Since I haven't had much to offer in the way of words, perhaps you'd appreciate some words from others. Last night the conference hosted readings from the accomplished writers in attendance. Below you can see pictures and listen to selections from their poems and essays. The sound quality is not great, but it is audible.
Breyten "Breyten" Breytenbach:
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 10:21 AM | Comments (0)
June 13, 2006
(g)Ulp
Today's analogy comes to you courtesy of our tour of a winery near the Florence-Pisa border. Once again we faced a master craftsman among his tools. The winemaker insisted that "It is not about the alcohol only. It is about the history, the tasting, flavors." But if there were not alcohol involved...?
We don't write to get drunk as opposed to writing to find true flavor, strictly speaking. (Both work as metaphors.) There is more to be said, but for now I hope you are happy with a pretty picture.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)
June 12, 2006
Breakfast is a Nervous Affair
What do you say over coffee to the guy across the table who, by the way, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry? What about the bald guy who's won two PEN/Faulkners and a National Book Award?
Another poet read aloud from the International Herald Tribune about Guantanamo. The only thing that occurred to my groggy mind was how the IHT seemed to have gained an appreciation for the interaction between Congress and the White House at the same time that Sheryl Stolberg switched beats from the former to the latter, replacing the snarky Elisabeth Bumiller. Perhaps needless to say, I didn't bring this up. Meanwhile, there was a subtle oneupmanship going on that I didn't even see until I was participating. To the writer who brought Rilke to the breakfast table, I brought, uh, Dashiell Hammett to the classroom. No one noticed.
This afternoon we got a tour of the villa's extensive gardens from its head gardener. Lest this sound like a paltry position, NYU is on a 10-year campaign to restore the gardens to their neo-Renaissance (1930s) state. The estate is 57 acres, some of which has been used as farmland since then, so it's a significant project.
The gardener was a philosophical guy. He said that his interest in gardening comes from being in touch with nature--since we are all, of course, animals. But what separates us from animals is, of course, art--and this is where gardening came in. Shaping hedges, laying out plants in a certain geometry, cutting a hole in the hedges so that a marble vase appears to cup the Duomo, in the distance, like an egg holder. Working to put form to the wilds of nature. I scoffed, but only once, and quietly: He was as passionate about the scheme as most of the writers here are about their craft. And their projects are not really so different.
This morning's first talk led off with the idea that we ought to use "material knowledge to manage the howling contingencies" of the world. The moments of formal exactness in a piece, the writer said, are just fictions a writer has to create. (Break out the hedge clippers.) Music, not painting, he pointed out, is the real analogue of narrative: Form in sequence over time. These are the kind of glib writerly thoughts that prove useful, at least to some writers, at least for a time, at which point they must be abandoned. And then we are left with little but practice and hard work.
Our teacher's example of his kind of artifice is Menzel's painting of Friedrich II visiting the painter Pense. (1861) His unpacking of John McPhee's piece on Los Angeles geology, which once prompted someone to remark "sometimes a line break is just a line break," will be familiar to some of you.
The discussion turned to Ian Frazier and his freedom with language within the formal rigor of his stories. My own favorite example is in the film Stop Making Sense, whose title, I realized only today, is pretty ironic. It's a Talking Heads concert film that opens with a tightly choreographed assembly of the band, the set and backdrop. But as the show goes on, the musicians, particularly David Byrne, become irrepressibly expressive. Within the structure, he can act out quite a great deal and still call it art.
The next step down this path comes in asking who imposes the structure. Sometimes the subject suggests it: There's a straightforward way to proceed through the writing of a biography. Elsewhere, a writer can establish a thematic structure in which the narrative events may not even be in chronological order. Since the choice of what to include or leave out ultimately falls to the writer, the question is always: Did things happen this way, or were they ordered? When the guy on my right said of Virginia Woolf, "I could dig it," I noticed that the kid to my left was dotting his Is with circles. These are the serious questions we're wrestling with here.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)
June 11, 2006
Light in the Pietra
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 09:51 PM | Comments (0)
Room With a View
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 09:13 PM | Comments (0)